What’s the buzz?
James Baron was working as a waiter in his hometown of Petersfield, Hampshire, while studying for his A-levels. He had a place at university but shocked his parents by deciding that instead of going away to study architecture, what he really wanted was to stay at the restaurant and become a chef.
Two decades on, the 38-year-old Baron presumably doesn’t regret the decision: a formidable and unconventional cooking career has taken him around the world and seen him garlanded with awards and plaudits.
After making his name in Switzerland, Austria and Hong Kong, he returned to the Alps last year to open a 20-cover restaurant, La Chavallera, in a 16th-century riverfront inn in La Punt-Chamues-ch, high in Switzerland’s Engadin Valley. Three months later it won a Michelin star. This summer the renovation of 18 bedrooms was completed and it opened as a hotel called Krone Säumerei.
Location
The village of La Punt-Chamues-ch is eight miles up the road from St Moritz — though a world away from the glitz of the celebrated resort. Davos is 15 miles as the crow flies, but more than double that by road.
La Punt and Chamues-ch are actually two small villages that face each other across the fast-flowing River Inn, the tributary of the Danube that gives Innsbruck its name. Their position, close the foot of the Albula pass, made them an important stop on trade routes, hence the villages’ wealth, evident from its richly sgrafittoed houses, decorated with images of ibex, chamois, red deer and other fauna, and two churches, one baroque with an onion dome, the other Gothic with a spire.
Five minutes’ walk from the hotel, there is a train station with hourly connections to Zurich. Even the fastest route takes about three hours, with two changes, but the scenery is spectacular.
Checking in
It may have four stars, but Krone feels more like a restaurant with rooms than a hotel, and a refreshingly informal, unpretentious one at that. Arriving in the late afternoon, I found someone to check me in in one of the dining rooms. Formalities informally completed, he explained there was no soap or shampoo in the rooms — “for the sake of the environment”. Instead, you’re invited to cut yourself a slice from a block of soap made in-house from local goat’s milk or scented with flowers from the valley. The milky option, he advised, produces a more abundant foam (lovely to use, but it didn’t really work on my hair). With soap in one hand, and an actual metal key in the other, I was directed to the lift.
Though the building dates back to 1565, the rooms are modern and minimalist: white walls, grey felt curtains (at least in mine), black Louis Poulsen AJ lamps and floors of Swiss stone pine. The alcoves around the blissfully comfortable Hüsler Nest beds are lined in larch, from which the bespoke furniture is also made. (Every window has a built-in seat; most have a mountain view.)
Bar the red pedestal of a table topped with green Poschiavo Serpentin marble, the only colour was the vibrant orange of a signed print by the eminent Swiss artist Not Vital, who was born in the Engadin and still spends part of the year in the valley. That so many of his works hang throughout the hotel is thanks to its owner, the entrepreneur Beat Curti, who is also an investor in the planned InnHub La Punt, a 7,000 sq m “campus for co-creation, innovation and transformation for human and planetary health”, beautifully designed by Norman Foster.
The decor downstairs is more traditionally Alpine. In bad weather, you can hunker down in the Steiner Stuba, a cosy sitting room with historic pine panelling and red plush seating, named after the Swiss photographer Albert Steiner, who documented life in this valley in the early 20th century and whose prints decorate the walls. There’s a tall, tiled stove in one corner; an impressive display of grappas; a turntable and a stack of nostalgic vinyl, strong on 1970s soul, jazz funk and R&B.
What about the food?
Baron began his professional career as a sous chef at the three Michelin-starred Schloss Schauenstein in Switzerland before moving to the Hotel Tannenhof in St Anton and then to Amber at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong where, as chef de cuisine, he ran a brigade of 37 and won two Michelin stars. Here he is one of team of seven, producing nine dishes per sitting — five starters, a fish main, a meat one and two desserts, one of them cheese-based — from which you’re invited to choose four for SFr148 (about £135), six for SFr178 or eight for SFr228, plus assorted amuse-bouches and mignardises. Over two nights, I worked my way through eight of them and savoured every mouthful. A second star is surely only a matter of time.
Every plate is a picture, an exquisitely composed arrangement of flavour-packed gels, crumbs, foams, viridian oils and piquant leaves, though there are also beurre blancs and sabayons as reassurance that this is a chef trained in classic French cuisine. And, of course, there are luxurious ingredients such as summer truffle (grated over a translucently thin ravioli filled with an earthy purée of pears, dried and rehydrated in tea) and caviar (alongside trout mousse, watermelon, ribbons of subtly pickled cucumber and the petals of a white cosmos flower).
The restaurant looks towards the river, over a largely edible garden, in which Baron grows not just herbs but types of ginger, Sichuan and Korean pepper, sea buckthorn and rosebay willowherb, which fermented — a lot of fermenting and pickling goes on here — and dried makes a tisane.
Baron’s real genius, however, lies in how he elevates ordinary ingredients. Who knew vinegar powder, sugar and salt could render popcorn so thrillingly delicious? Or that pickling could transform a lärchen, the tiny, furry, you’d-have-thought-inedible pinecone of a larch tree (he is also a keen forager) into something arrestingly nutty and aromatic.
Hotel guests aren’t guaranteed a table unless they’ve booked but the same kitchen also serves an à la carte restaurant, Stüva (open daily for lunch and dinner), where the dishes are heartier (pasta, tagliata, rack of lamb) and marginally less expensive, though a bowl of gnocchi with nettle pesto is still SFr32.
What to do?
Dining aside, most guests come for hiking or golf in summer (there are two nearby courses), or skiing and snowshoeing in winter. Buses to the nearest ski stations — Zuoz in one direction and Celerina and St Moritz in the other — stop outside the hotel. And the annual Engadin Ski Marathon passes close to the front door, and makes a fabulous spectacle (its 54th edition is scheduled for March 10 2024).
The valley is also an art destination. I spent a fascinating afternoon about 50 minutes’ drive up the valley at Schloss Tarasp, the 11th-century mountaintop home of Not Vital, which is furnished with his wildly eclectic collection of antique furniture, sculpture and art. Vital’s foundation runs two further institutions close by: the 17th-century Planta House in Ardez and a sculpture park in Sent, the village where he was born. More easily accessible, however, is Muzeum Susch, opened in 2019 in a 12th-century monastery by the collector Grażyna Kulczyk, while St Moritz has leading commercial galleries, including Karsten Greve and Hauser & Wirth.
Other guests
Couples, mostly well-heeled and silver-haired, and families in hiking gear, all predominantly from Zurich.
Cost
Double rooms start at SFr245 (about £225), including breakfast (for which all the baking and jam-making is done in-house — the croissants are in a class of their own).
Elevator pitch
Haute cuisine of the highest order and somewhere to sleep it off.
Claire Wrathall was a guest of Switzerland Tourism (myswitzerland.com) and Krone Säumerei am Inn (krone-lapunt.ch). The hotel reopens for the winter season on December 15
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